Save/Load text files instead of text strings.

[jamiechi1]

Suggestion

Instead of copying and pasting strings, give me a Load/Save dialog to load or save the entire text file.

What ?

Copying and Pasting text that is impossible to read is quite cumbersome and prone to errors. Especially when the string is really big. It is easy to mis-select a string when copying or pasting.

Furthermore instead of saving these sometimes very long strings in a cache file somewhere can slow my system down. (Maybe?) And it takes much longer to alt-tab to a text editor to get or save the string.

I think using a normal windows file open/close dialog would work better and I think it would be quicker.
This means I would not have to alt-tab back and forth between a text editor and the game.
Basically, Quality of Life.

Note that this applies to any blueprint or other items where I need to copy or past a string.

[DaleStan]

I think using a normal windows file open/close dialog would work better and I think it would be quicker.

People on Mac or Linux or Switch might have a different opinion here.

Copying and Pasting text that is impossible to read is quite cumbersome and prone to errors.

What is the use case were you need to copy/paste blueprint strings frequently? Can you put the blueprints in a book and import/export one book instead of dozens of blueprints?

The only times I copy/paste blueprints are:
- I copied them from a website, which invariably has a "copy" button
- I'm sharing them on a website, so I want the blueprint on my clipboard so I can just paste it in
- I'm copying them out of a old (as in 0.something) save and into a 1.1 save, where again I don't really want the bp on disk; I just export in 0.16, alt-tab to 1.1, and import

[DarkShadow44]

I too don't see this as necessary.

Copying and Pasting text that is impossible to read is quite cumbersome and prone to errors. Especially when the string is really big. It is easy to mis-select a string when copying or pasting.

But there is a copy button, and CTRL-A, CTRL-C works fine as well.

Furthermore instead of saving these sometimes very long strings in a cache file somewhere can slow my system down. (Maybe?) And it takes much longer to alt-tab to a text editor to get or save the string.

I don't think there is any slow down here. If anything, using the clipboard over a file makes it quicker.

[FuryoftheStars]

Copying and Pasting text that is impossible to read is quite cumbersome and prone to errors. Especially when the string is really big. It is easy to mis-select a string when copying or pasting.

Forgive me, but if you're copying from in the game, then you need to copy the entire thing and (I'm pretty sure) the game gives you a copy button in all cases to do that for you, so I'm not sure I'm understanding where readability comes into play?

Out of game, you should be sure to leave plenty of space between each string.

Furthermore instead of saving these sometimes very long strings in a cache file somewhere can slow my system down. (Maybe?) And it takes much longer to alt-tab to a text editor to get or save the string.

I think using a normal windows file open/close dialog would work better and I think it would be quicker.
This means I would not have to alt-tab back and forth between a text editor and the game.
Basically, Quality of Life.

Clipboard contents reside exclusively in your PC's memory. If copying a large text string is slowing it down, then you likely don't have a lot of free memory and it's using the pagefile. This can happen on systems without a lot of memory (in which case you're screwed regardless), or in cases where the system hasn't been restarted often enough. Similarly, alt-tabbing should not be slow to a text editor and could be caused by the same issues.

(Just as a side note (I'm not saying that you are doing this, but I just wanted to put this out there), while I understand and do not necessarily disagree with the concept that it's better for the life of a computer's components to be left on constantly (vs being powered off & on), it's not good for system resource availability to not at least be rebooted once in a while, and should be rebooted (at minimum in my opinion) at least once a week. And frankly, even though I shut my computers off daily, I haven't had one die in less than 7 years without external factors (drop, power spike, etc), so I personally don't even think the life span saved is worth it.)

[Factoruser]

It would be nice if the interface would offer you some stored strings... It won't even need to be very sophisticated... just a file "strings.txt" in the savefile folder, one line e.g. "MAP:Myhell", followed by a line ">>>eNp1UTtLA0EQnvEMxgiaIk1AYoq0sVArkexqIyr6H...andsoon", and an emtpy line for beautiness. "MAP:" signals that it's a map exchange string named "Myhell". "BOOK:" would be e.g. a blueprint book, maybe also just "ITEM:" for single blueprints, books and whatever.

When importing a string you get a list of strings that can be currently imported (=> MAP: or ITEM:) with their given name/alias. Clicking inserts the corresponding string... Exporting a string would allow to name and save the string into this file; using an existing name is overwriting the previous one. And unfortunately you'll need an erase-button... In principle only supporting this "strings.txt" hand-edited would be already enough - it wouldn't be less comfortable that the current system.